It doesn't matter because the business aspects of WoW are not a concern to anyone but the company. Your sub does not grant you shareholder status. I'm sure most people aren't playing this game because 10 million others are and if a million step away they feel obliged to as well, and if there are those who do, they are doing it wrong.

the deal you're referring to would have expired in october '12 for most that signed up straight away.[COLOR="red"]

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I don´t think we ever knew how much over 10M it got. If it was 10.5M, then I could see them saying ´still above 10M´ or something like that. I really can´t see it climbing from where it was right after MoP launched, but I don´t think it dropped much either. If it was 10.1M last time, I can see them saying ´almost 10M´ this time or something like that.

People need to realize the big drop in Cata was because of the lack of content for casual players. you got to 85 and had nothing to do but run 8 heroic dungeons non-stop. With MoP, the opposite is true, there is probably too much for us to do.

In the US it went from 25k raiding guilds in Cata down to less than 15k guilds now. That's a 40% drop right there.

According to Blizzard (I can't quote the post but it is somewhere) the introduction of LFR increased the people that are raiding imensly (idc if you say LFR is no raid, but there are lots of people doing it). People have not stoped playing, they just stoped raiding normals.

Relly? How do you think they keep delevoping stuff in world of warcraft? With a high amount of good will? Or thanks to the magic of the money?

Less subscriptions means less income, less income means less employees, less employees means less contente. So yeah, think again.

Subscriptions matter to the average player for 2 reasons

1. Staffing - This doesn´t matter for WOW since they never really ramped up staffing to begin with. But for games like The Secret World.. loss of subscriptions meant half the dev team terminated and customer support team non-existent. I think WOW would have to drop a long way before it resulted in dev team being reduced in size.

2. Radical Changes - This one does affect WOW. If (and when they did in Cata) WOW loses a substantial amount of players, it kinda forces radical changes in the game. One of the reasons we have so many dailies, and gated dailies is that one of the biggest reasons CATA lost so many subscribers is because there was almost nothing for non-raiders to do after the first month of Cata. Then later on you had the huge drop after DS was released and we realized there would be 8 or more months again(same as wotlk) with no new content. The first time (wotlk) seemed strange, but the second time it set a pattern, and we unsubscribed because of that pattern. The two most radical changes in MoP ( the huge amount of casual content and the rapid deployment of patches) came about because of the reasons for the huge drop in subs during Cata. If there is no huge drop in subs, then the devs are more likely to maintain the status quo. The devs are always going to try new things, but a drop in subs forces them to be more radical in those decisions.

I suspect a moderate drop, maybe 500K. The wild card is China. We don't know how well the expansion has been received there.

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First thing's first, I don't believe the whole "XFire is an accurate predictor of WoW subs" thing. I don't know anyone that still uses XFire.
Also can't use WoWCensus since that's still figuring out data parses from December...

So really all we can do is guess.

I would say holding steady at 9.8-10.3 million.

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I suspect a moderate drop, maybe 500K. The wild card is China. We don't know how well the expansion has been received there.

Do you really think there will be a drop? I suspect you may be right, but somehow I can't shake the feeling that there is going to be slight rise (although I'm not sure this will be due to western subs). I agree China is an unknown but with Christmas and the release of MOP in China I would have thought the very least Blizzard would be hoping for is subs remaining steady.